2017-07-28

destroyer of worlds

One of my main research accomplishments today was to work up a project proposal for Yuan-Sen Ting (ANU) and others about finding stars whose spectra suggest that they have (recently) swallowed a lot of rocky material. This was inspired by a few things: The first is that Andy Casey (Monash) can find Li-rich stars in LAMOST just by looking at the residuals away from a fit by The Cannon at the location of Li lines. The second is that Semyeong Oh (Princeton) and various collaborators have found Sun-like stars that look like they have swallowed many Earth masses of rock in their recent pasts, by doing (or having John Brewer of Yale do) detailed chemical abundance work on the spectra. The third is that Yuan-Sen Ting has derivatives of spectral expectations with respect to all elements for LAMOST-like spectra.

At the end of the day, Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA) gave a colloquium on the After-Sloan-IV project, which my loyal reader knows a lot about. I learned things in his talk, however: One is that SDSS-III BOSS has found several broad (ish) lined quasars that shut off between SDSS-I and SDSS-III. One relevant paper is here. Another is that he (with Jonathan Bird of Vandy) has made some beautiful visualizations of the point of doing dense sampling of the giant stars in the Milky Way disk.